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Monday, August 18, 2014

Garden updates

I've made a few edits to the front garden bed, but they were significant.

I dug up the Valentine roses and put them in pots in the back. I did this for 2 reasons:

I decided I really wanted an orange bloom instead of red

The deer were decimating them

I'll keep them there until it's cool enough to put them back in the ground, and then I'll plant them in the back. They're flourishing without deer snacking on them nightly, which doesn't bode well for the roses I plan to replace them with. This gardening-with-deer thing is more challenging than I anticipated.

I'm using 'Lafter' instead, which you might have seen in pictures from my old garden.

Image from Countryside Roses

I'm only planting 3, and if I can't keep them from getting stripped clean by the stinkin' deer then I'll have to find an alternative entirely to roses in the front. That prospect makes me sad.

I also bought some Canna 'Wyoming' from Karchesky Canna. I had some of those in my old garden as well. (I pulled up the 'Blueberry Sparkler' canna I planted in the Spring, and it's now in a temporary pot too.)

And now my favorite recent purchase: Yucca Rostrata 'Sapphire Skies':

I'd had the smaller one in a pot for a few years, and got the larger one for a really good price. (It's approximately 25 years old - they're slow growers.)

It's exactly what I'd originally pictured against that wall, but seemed too expensive at the time. You know how sometimes you think about making a big purchase for a long while, and then when you do it's not what you hoped? This wasn't one of those times. I'd spent all summer being dissatisfied with that bed's composition, and I finally feel like it's moving in the right direction.

You can't tell from the picture, but I have smaller yucca rostrata in the pots throughout the garden, so there's symmetry and all that.

I just received some iris I ordered from Schreiner's Iris, and I'm anxious to get those in the ground but I'm keeping them in pots until September. I can't afford to lose any of them to this heat!

I installed some drip irrigation today, so we'll see if that keeps things alive. It finally started getting stupid hot here. We were lucky to have had as mild a Spring as we did, for as long as we did.